James Kelly (ca. 1839-1912)

February 22, 2007 
/ Contributed By: Sara Massey

James Kelly|

James Kelly

Photo courtesy Black American West Museum

James โ€œJimโ€ Kelly, born in Williamson County, Texas, was the son of manumitted slaves, “Uncle Amos” and “Aunt Phoebe” Kelly, who had belonged to the Olive clan, a family of powerful Texas cattlemen. After 1865 Kelly worked for Isom Prentice (Print) Olive, a former Confederate soldier, becoming a trail boss and gunman for the Olive ranch. Kelly functioned as a regulator whenever the Olives believed their enemies deserved extralegal justice. As a grown man, Kelly was slim and ruggedly handsome, standing six feet six inches tall.

The Olive ranch dealt with cattle rustlers, often inflicting swift and punitive justice on them.ย  Print Olive, his brothers Thomas, Ira and Bob and Jim Kelly often shot thieves on the spot.ย  Soon they became known and feared as a โ€œgun outfit.โ€ย  Kellyโ€™s gun-slinging skills made him the top enforcer or โ€œregulatorโ€ for the Olives.

When Texas to Kansas cattle drives began in 1866, Print Olive and a trail crew that included Kelly drove several thousand head to Sedalia, Kansas. Three years later in 1869 Olive and Kelly took two thousand cattle to Fort Kearny, Nebraska. Olive and Kelly returned to Texas with $50,000. On the 1872 drive to Abilene, Kansas, Print Olive, after selling three thousand cattle and making a $45,000 profit, headed for a poker game in an Abilene saloon where he got into an altercation with a gambler.ย  Kellyโ€™s fast gun saved Oliveโ€™s life.

In 1878, Print Olive moved his cattle operation north to Nebraska.ย  Kelly and other cowboys employed by Olive drove fifteen thousand head of cattle to Custer County, Nebraska. To police the range against rustlers and homesteaders, ranchers formed the Custer County Livestock Association, electing Print as its first president with Jim Kelly as the associationโ€™s chief enforcer.

Later that year problems developed between the Olive brothers and two homesteaders whom they charged with killing their cattle. After capturing the men, Print Oliver ordered them hanged. Olive, Jim Kelly, and others were later arrested.ย  Although charges were dismissed against Kelly and the other men, Print Olive went to prison.

James Kelly spent his last years in Ansley, Nebraska, dying in February 1912, at seventy-three.

About the Author

Author Profile

Sara Reid Massey was retired from the University of Texas, Institute of Texan Cultures at San Antonio, where she developed award-winning educational materials on Texas history. She was the editor of the Black Cowboys of Texas, winner of the 2000 T.R. Fehrenbach Award of the Texas Historical Commission, co-author of Turn of the Century Photographs: San Diego, and editor of Texas Women on the Cattle Trails, winner of the 2006 Liz Carpenter Award from the Texas State Historical Association. Her study, Never From from The Sea: The Vietnamese of the Texas Gulf Coast, received the Community History Award from the Texas Oral History Association. Sara Reid Massey died on her 75th birthday, August 17, 2013, in Comfort, Texas.

CITE THIS ENTRY IN APA FORMAT:

Massey, S. (2007, February 22). James Kelly (ca. 1839-1912). BlackPast.org. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/kelly-james-c-1839-1912/

Source of the Author's Information:

James Smallwood, โ€œJames Kelly: The Ebony Gunโ€; Sara R. Massey, Black
Cowboys of
Texas (College Station: Texas A&M University Press,
2000).

Further Reading